Red faces over asylum seekers' Red Nose cash

Since last Red Nose Day Comic Relief has spent £858,000 on refugee projects. Add to this another £5 million it spends on projects for disadvantaged and homeless people, many of which cater for asylum seekers, and it is clear that this is an issue dear to the popular charity. Yet the plight of asylum seekers in Britain is not one that Comic Relief or Red Nose Day celebrities such as All Saints, Ewan McGregor and Geri Halliwell seem to want to be associated with, even as the Government prepares immigration law changes that will infinitely worsen the plight of some of the country's most disadvantaged men, women and children.

Refugees are not glamorous if they are in this country.

The new Immigration and Asylum Bill, which will receive royal assent in late autumn, aims to make the system fairer and more efficient. In fact, the far-reaching changes include, in effect, expelling asylum seekers from the cash economy.

All their rights to benefits will be removed and the families will dependent for all food and clothes on vouchers from the Immigration Service. It will be illegal for them to work, and they will have only one offer of accommodation, which could be anywhere in the country as groups of asylum seekers are dispersed nationwide.

Comic Relief and other British charities working with refugees are anticipating a crisis as thousands seek help - refugees such as 'Wazim', for example. He is 23, fleeing persecution from the Islamic extremist Taliban in Afghanistan. Wazim's is one 60,000 cases mouldering away at the Immigration Service headquarters in Croydon, South London, where 16,000 letters remain unopened and files are rotting.

Since New Labour came to power a further 13,000 cases have joined the backlog.

Wazim arrived in London last year and lived on food given him by other refugees. He slept on people's floors. His local authority could not accommodate him and in a new initiative to ease the pressure on London boroughs, it said he would have to move to Ramsgate or Coventry if he wanted help.

He chose Coventry where he was put in a hostel for people with drug-related mental health problems. Because Coventry has no established Afghan community, Wazim had to rely heavily on social services. When he contacted a small project for refugees in the city, he was told there were no funds to help him - but someone gave him his train fare back to London, where he has been sleeping rough.

Wazim's plight has been taken up by the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, one of the charities that is making desperate preparations for the crisis.

His case is likely to be replicated a thousand-fold by the new immigration legislation going through Parliament, which will disperse the asylum seekers in 'clusters'.

'There's a risk of totally excluding asylum seekers from mainstream society,' says Anne Thomas of the Refugee Council, which hopes the Government can be persuaded to amend the Bill when it reaches its committee stage this week.

Everyone recognises that the present system is at breaking point. The Government has pledged to sort out the backlog of rotting files within six months. The Bill aims to ease further the burden on London's local authorities, which deal with 80 per cent of asylum seekers, by setting up a centralised national voucher system for them and by dispersing new arrivals.

Supporters of the refugees, however, fear the new system will leave asylum seekers destitute.

'By moving them around the country, the Government is attempting a massive experiment in social engineering,' says Thomas.

The Asylum Rights Campaign will warn this week that the dispersal system is likely to be a 'shambles'.

Charities are concerned that many refugees will return to London or the South-east and be forced into begging, prostitution and crime rather than starve.

Campaigners are highly critical of the Government decision to run the system of food and clothing hand-outs from the Immigration Service, which even Ministers admit is the most shambolic department in Whitehall.

All the major domestic charities dealing with homelessness, children and poverty are mobilising to prevent what Barnado's describes is an 'impractical and inhumane' system. In a submission to the Commons Standing Committee on the Bill, London-based Barnardo's said: 'Reception zones may become ghettoes and could expose asylum families to racial attacks.'

John Rearcroft, of the Barnardo-funded Families in Temporary Accomodation Project, said: 'These people are often the most needy. Two years ago, refugees made up 35 per cent of our work. Now they account for 85 per cent. These families need our help but if the proposed legislation comes into force, then our expertise is going to be useless because they won't be in London.'

Barnardo's has challenged Government plans to remove all asylum seekers' offspring from the protection of the Children Act. This means they will no longer be defined as 'children in need.'

A Save the Children spokesman, Leigh Daynes, said: 'This is extremely regressive legislation and makes no specific provision for children. And these are the most marginalised children there can be.'

Campaigners from big charities preparing for their biggest campaign in recent years are puzzled over why the question looms of why their public reaction to the forthcoming problems has been muted so far.

Comic Relief made no mention of its asylum-seeker work during Red Nose Day events nor in publicity about where it spends its money, preferring catch-all terms such as 'general projects' or the 'homeless'.

Sources inside the organisation confirmed that it would be increasing the proportion of money from this year's appeal that it spends on impoverished refugees.

But Comic Relief, like other charities working in the field, is seriously concerned that promoting the rights of asylum seekers could prompt a backlash against the charities from newspapers that have already made clear their opposition to the asylum seekers.

And there is certainly evidence to support their fear. The editor of the Dover Express, for example, was recently warned he could face prosecution for inciting racial hatred after he had published an editorial describing asylum seekers as 'human sewage'.